Netware hardware Question

Your Compaq server should have included a CD with Compaq Insight Manager on it. This app is an SNMP-based utility to allow you to check server hardware, parameters, etc. and alert you if you have problems. Novell also has Managewise and ZEN for Servers. Check their web site for details.

Insight Manager indeed is one giant source of information. Load your Management CD in the server, locate "cpqagin.nlm" on it, and run that one. Accept the defaults, and it will install the needed agents for you. Load the same CD on a client, and install "Compaq Insight Manager". When you run it, green lights are good, yellow lights are to be looked at, and red lights are bad. And it can show you graphs on CPU usage, network traffic, disk I/O etc.

In Monitor.nlm you'll find quite some useful information as well. In the "Lan/Wan information" menu, you can check if there are errors piling up on your network, or in "Storage Information" you can see if your disks start using hot-fix blocks. However, these things are less obvious to find and interpret, and they don't necessary always indicate a hardware problem.

Jim

You can get a lot of information about your server from the Nwconfig console. You'll have to dig around, but you can find the statistics on your NIC, memory (hard faults and soft), swap size (min - max), and you can look at space utilization. For specific network statistics you can load ipxcon and tcpcon. There are tons of screens that will tell you how your NDS is doing, how much memory NDS is taking, how many changes are occuring etc.

First write down what it is you are curious about. Then get a copy of the server manual. Not all of the screens will be under NWconfig, but most are.

Remember that Insight Manager only works on Compaq machines, using the consoles to gather basic information works on all types of hardware.

Novell has the manuals online at www.Novell.com. They are much better than the ones that came on the CD.

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